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Don't get your hopes up too much. This blog post from 2017 looks at a draft of the document: https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulgar-lati

by bhaak 8y ago

Don't get your hopes up too much. This blog post from 2017 looks at a draft of the document: https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulgar-latin-siren-call-polyglot https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulga... It's not really a favorable review.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Another post from the same blog trashes another hypothesis: https://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/08/voynichese-abjad https://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/08/voynichese-abjad In it, way down at the bottom, the author drops a fairly concise argument for what I think is the most compelling hypothesis of all: That it's a covertext for a cipher. The idea that it's a message written in the clear is hard to reconcile with how the text doesn't behave at all like a natural language. The idea that it was a prank or an art project is hard to reconcile with just how much time and money was clearly spent in producing it. The idea that it's a legitimate book, but one where only a relatively small fraction of the text contains any semantic content, is relatively easy to reconcile with both.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  > The idea that it was a prank or an art project is hard to reconcile with just how much time and money was clearly spent in producing it. Why is it hard to imagine someone pouring a lot of work into art?
  - Frondo 8y ago
    It shouldn't be; Henry Darger wrote tens of thousands of pages of material he didn't think anyone would ever read. "In the realms of the Unreal," for the curious.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    Largely for historical reasons: The materials that went into it would have been immensely expensive at the time it was written, and people generally had less free time back then. Meaning that the cost to do something like the Voynich Manuscript, in terms of both time and money, would have been much higher back then than they are now. That's not to say that it's impossible, per se, just that, if that's the conclusion we are to draw, then it would perhaps cast the Voynich as being even more singular than it already is.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Most people had less time back then, but a few people had a lot of free time. “Bored noble” explains a fairly decent amount of artistic and scientific output before the industrial revolution.
      - bunderbunder 8y ago
        There's also the angle that, in the same way that the text doesn't statistically resemble real languages, it also doesn't seem to be a great match for known examples of asemic text (e.g., Codex Seraphinianus), either.
        village-idiot 8y ago
        That’s really beyond my linguistic knowledge to comment on. All I’m saying is that a bored noble would have the time and resources to create an expensive work purely for their own entertainment. Humans have done far weirder things over the centuries than that.
        bunderbunder 8y ago
        One would have, but there are also cultural barriers to consider. I'm no expert on late medieval or early renaissance Italian culture, but what amateur reading I've done paints a picture of a culture where the nobility may have been literate and able to write letters, but serious writing such as creating vellum books was still considered dull, dirty, grueling work that was beneath their station. Henry Darger (who was, IIRC, a janitor) was mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I think that you might get a more culturally comparable example out of the idea of Sarah Winchester whiling her time away in a manner more akin to how Edward Leedskalnin did.

by bhaak 8y ago

bunderbunder 8y ago

Another post from the same blog trashes another hypothesis: https://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/08/voynichese-abjad https://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/08/voynichese-abjad In it, way down at the bottom, the author drops a fairly concise argument for what I think is the most compelling hypothesis of all: That it's a covertext for a cipher. The idea that it's a message written in the clear is hard to reconcile with how the text doesn't behave at all like a natural language. The idea that it was a prank or an art project is hard to reconcile with just how much time and money was clearly spent in producing it. The idea that it's a legitimate book, but one where only a relatively small fraction of the text contains any semantic content, is relatively easy to reconcile with both.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
> The idea that it was a prank or an art project is hard to reconcile with just how much time and money was clearly spent in producing it. Why is it hard to imagine someone pouring a lot of work into art?
- Frondo 8y ago
  It shouldn't be; Henry Darger wrote tens of thousands of pages of material he didn't think anyone would ever read. "In the realms of the Unreal," for the curious.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Largely for historical reasons: The materials that went into it would have been immensely expensive at the time it was written, and people generally had less free time back then. Meaning that the cost to do something like the Voynich Manuscript, in terms of both time and money, would have been much higher back then than they are now. That's not to say that it's impossible, per se, just that, if that's the conclusion we are to draw, then it would perhaps cast the Voynich as being even more singular than it already is.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Most people had less time back then, but a few people had a lot of free time. “Bored noble” explains a fairly decent amount of artistic and scientific output before the industrial revolution.
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      There's also the angle that, in the same way that the text doesn't statistically resemble real languages, it also doesn't seem to be a great match for known examples of asemic text (e.g., Codex Seraphinianus), either.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        That’s really beyond my linguistic knowledge to comment on. All I’m saying is that a bored noble would have the time and resources to create an expensive work purely for their own entertainment. Humans have done far weirder things over the centuries than that.
        bunderbunder 8y ago
        One would have, but there are also cultural barriers to consider. I'm no expert on late medieval or early renaissance Italian culture, but what amateur reading I've done paints a picture of a culture where the nobility may have been literate and able to write letters, but serious writing such as creating vellum books was still considered dull, dirty, grueling work that was beneath their station. Henry Darger (who was, IIRC, a janitor) was mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I think that you might get a more culturally comparable example out of the idea of Sarah Winchester whiling her time away in a manner more akin to how Edward Leedskalnin did.